COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Counter-Recruitment: General
Six Lessons for Young Men on the Edge of War
Michael Schwalbe, CommonDreams. org
August 16, 2006
Military service was a rite of passage into adulthood for males in myfamily. My grandfather and two uncles served in the navy. One uncle served
in the air force. And my father spent three years in the army. As a boy, it
seemed natural that I too would enlist when I finished high school. The
only question was, Which branch? Then Vietnam came along.
I was fourteen when four students were shot dead by National Guard troops
at Kent State University in May of 1970 during a protest against the
Vietnam War. At that time I had no clear idea of what was going on in
Vietnam or why people were protesting. My concerns that summer ran to
baseball, fishing, and playing along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Vietnam
was just words and pictures on TV.
But somehow Kent State pierced my boyhood shell. As I recall, my parents
were not sympathetic to the students. "The students shouldn't have been
there, and the troops felt threatened," one adult in my family said. I
wasn't sure what to think. It seemed to me, having attended a strict German
Lutheran grade school, that students ought to be attending classes and
studying, not rioting. On the other hand, I was pretty sure that no one
deserved to be killed for exercising their free speech rights while
marching across a campus.
I started high school that fall, and while I didn't hang out with an
especially political crowd, I began to pick up, perhaps from older
students, a more critical vibe about Vietnam. That was the first time I
became aware that some people thought the war was based on lies. Lies about
the Bay of Tonkin, about the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government,
about the civilian death toll, and about the motives of U.S. government
leaders.
Not that this radically affected my thinking. At that time I had no way to
figure out where the truth lay amidst the competing views that surrounded
me. The adults in my family, as far as I could tell, supported the war out
of reflex patriotism. Coming from a working-class family, I also shared the
anti-elitist, anti-privilege sentiments behind the demand, wielded against
student protesters, to love America or leave it. Merle Haggard's "Okie from
Muskogee" resonated more strongly with me than Neil Young's "Four Dead in
Ohio."
The views among my high school friends were also mixed. Some despised Nixon
and opposed the war. Others were insufficiently bothered by Vietnam to be
deterred from seeking admission to the U.S. military academies. One friend
went to Annapolis, another to West Point, and another to Colorado Springs.
Smart, serious guys. All of them National Merit Scholars.
What astounds me now is that even with the war and protests going on in the
early 1970s, and all of us within a couple years of draftable age, we still
didn't pay much attention. The war, for all its prominence in the media,
was not a main topic of our conversation. If it came up, it was usually
because someone had a brother or cousin who'd been drafted, or who'd been
killed, or who'd just been discharged. We weren't dissecting the war as a
matter of right or wrong foreign policy. Nor were we talking in any serious
way about what it would mean to be personally involved. As the teenage male
products of U.S. culture, we were not equipped for that kind of conversation.
My uncertainty about military service lasted until the fall of 1973, when
an army recruiter visited my high school. The recruitment pitch, as I
recall, involved officer training, a commission, a four-year stretch, and
then a full ride through college. It sounded like a good deal, especially
since I wanted to go to college but wasn't sure how to pay for it. If
Vietnam crossed my mind as a reason not to enlist, I don't remember having
that thought. Besides, wasn't that mess over with?
Later I talked to my dad about the recruitment offer. I expected him to be
pleased that I was even considering it. Not only would I be carrying on the
tradition of military service in the family, but I'd do so as an officer,
and get my college paid for. I also had the impression that my father
enjoyed his time in the army. He never said a bad word about it. So I was
surprised when I told him about the offer and he said, with unusual
directness, "Don't do it."
What I don't remember is him saying exactly why I shouldn't do it. The
impression I retain, thirty-six years later, is that he thought the
recruiter's promises were untrustworthy, that the risks were too great, and
that things were unlikely to turn out well. I also retain a strong
impression of caring behind his advice. Maybe that's why I can't remember
exactly what he said. He was not the kind of man who would have articulated
his caring explictly, and so he said it in code.
Any lingering thoughts about military service were extinguished before I'd
finished my first year of college. Nearly everyone I met there was critical
of the Vietnam War and of how U.S. leaders had conducted it. The most
credible critics, to my mind, were the many veterans on campus at that
time. Every Vietnam veteran I met told a version of the same story: the war
was horrifically cruel and wasteful; most of what the military brass and
U.S. politicians said in defense of the war was bullshit; the Vietnamese
had driven the French out in the 1950s, and now they wanted the U.S. out,
so they could run their own country. One other thing the vets had in
common: they had known none of this when they enlisted.
Other vets silently testified to the horrors the rest of us could only
imagine. These were the guys who lived mainly in their own heads, moving
through campus space with seemingly little connection to the world around
them. They were scary, and best avoided when they drank. It seemed obvious
to me that only an idiot, or someone who didn't know any better, would want
to go through whatever had so badly rattled their minds.
I am fortunate in that I can't say what it's like to be a civilian or a
combatant in a war zone. But in the years since I was an undergraduate I
have studied violence, the myths of manhood, crimes of obedience, and
geopolitics. So what I can say, I hope, are some things that might make
young men less vulnerable to the seductions of war and to the pitches of
military recruiters. Had I been in a position to do so, this is what I
might have told the young men whose ignorance of history was exploited to
make the Vietnam War happen.
Recognize, first of all, that modern war kills more civilians than
soldiers. It used to be said that rich old men start wars, while the young
and the poor fight and die in them. That's still largely true. But now it's
not male soldiers who are most of those being maimed and killed. Forget
glorious cavalry charges and heroic infantry battles. On average,
ninety-percent of the casualties are women, children, and the elderly. This
makes all modern wars crimes against humanity. To join the military is to
put yourself in a position where you will be forced to be complicit in
these crimes. This alone is sufficient reason to refuse to participate.
The second lesson is that being forced to be complicit in butchering
innocent people creates a strong incentive to justify doing so. Military
training will aid this process. It will teach you to value the lives of
your fellow soldiers over those of the "enemy." Nationalism and racism will
add to the mix. Eventually, you will be able to see other human beings as
slopes, gooks, or hadjis -- all deserving the same moral consideration as
roaches. If you don't do this, you won't be able to live with yourself.
What the military will demand of you, in other words, is a diminishing of
your own humanity so that you can ignore the suffering of others. It will
not make you all you can be. It will try to make you less than a human
being should be.
Combine dehumanization of the enemy with the inevitability of civilians
being in harm's way and you have a recipe for atrocities. My Lai was not an
aberration. Nor, more recently, were Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, Ishaqi,
or Qana. What happened in these places is the logical outcome of racism,
nationalism, military conditioning, and the exigencies of violent conflict.
Those who run with the dogs of war are likely to grow fangs.
A third lesson is that the military will try to crush your moral autonomy.
The military can't function as the kind of organization it is if soldiers
think for themselves about what's right and wrong. While military and
international law say that soldiers are not obligated to obey illegal or
immoral orders, this abstract right of refusal means little in practical
terms. If military personnel were in a position to study international law
and act on their own reasoned judgments of what's legal and morally
correct, there would have been no U.S. invasion of Iraq.
In reality, you will be expected to obey orders under penalty of being
imprisoned, and, most compellingly, under penalty of seeing your buddies
hurt or killed. So you will forgo thinking for yourself and do as you're
told. This is the opposite of being treated like a responsible adult. The
military will try to fool you about this condition of infantilization by
wrapping it in the rhetoric of machismo. You may thus be drugged by your
own testosterone into believing that you are a real man, tough and
independent, rather than someone else's expendable tool.
A fourth lesson, for would-be soldiers and civilians alike, is that most of
what you will be told about the need for violence and killing will be lies.
The critics of the Vietnam War turned out to be right. We were lied to at
every turn. Then as now.
As historian Howard Zinn recounts, U.S. politicians have always lied to
justify imperialist wars. Given this pattern of deception, and given the
enormity of what's at stake, skepticism and thinking for one's self are not
only warranted but imperative. Of course, if you refuse to accept at face
value what rich men tell you about the need to kill others to preserve your
"freedom," you will be unfit for military service. You will be better fit,
however, to act as a citizen in a democratic society and as a member of a
world community.
Another lesson is that there are more honest and genuine ways to uphold
human freedom. To work for social justice is to expand people's freedom to
develop their potentials. To expose the lies of the powerful is to expand
people's freedom to make informed choices. To promote democracy is to
expand people's freedom to participate in shaping society. To work for a
clean environment or universal health care is to promote the freedom to
live without being the victim of corporate profit-seeking. To oppose
gratuitous war is to help create the peace upon which these other freedoms
depend, at home and around the world.
A final lesson is that wars can't happen without obedient soldiers. The
Vietnam War failed in part because too many people, soldiers and civilians,
began to see through the lies and think for themselves. In turn, they
became unmanageable by political, economic, and military elites, who then
realized they had to change course. The result was not a loss for the
United States, but a small victory for the spirit of democracy. In the case
of Vietnam, this came late and at a terrible cost. The size of the bill
that comes due for the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq will depend
on how soon the young people who now sit on the edge of war learn the
lessons it always teaches.
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